The Gentleness of Beasts

At the Università degli Studi di Milano Statale, tucked beneath the Sottoportico of the Cortile d'Onore, something monumental and quietly unsettling has taken up residence. Regeneration, a polychrome ceramic composition by Bertozzi & Casoni, presented with Galleria De Ambrogi Milano during this year's Fuorisalone, is not, despite the grandeur of its setting, interested in being merely decorative.

At the emotional center of the pyramidal work sits a gorilla cradling a deer across its lap — hands open, turned outward, in a gesture that reads less as dominance than as offering, hovering somewhere between a pietà and a confession. The gorilla is strength that has learned patience; the roe deer is grace that has learned to accept it. Together they propose a kind of interspecies tenderness that feels, given the current state of things, almost radical.

And then there is the base. Beneath this scene of improbable gentleness lies an accumulation of soiled mattresses and refuse — the unbeautiful sediment of human life. The work does not allow you to ascend toward its symbolism without first acknowledging what we have left on the ground.